UK.gov sinks another £1.6m into Internet of Stuff spec HyperCat

Blighty consortium gets additional funding

Blighty has announced another £1.6m in funding for its Internet of Stuff standard HyperCat, courtesy of the government’s Technology Strategy Board.

In a bid to go all Tim Berners-Lee on the much-hyped Internet of Things, UK.gov has teamed up with tech heavyweights like IBM and ARM to deliver an interoperability standard for devices that will allow them to discover each other. The so-called HyperCat specification can browse machines and search by metadata using standards like HTTPS, Restful APIs and JSON as data formats.

“In the same way that Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web specification unlocked the potential of the internet, the HyperCat specification will unlock the full potential of the internet of things by creating a world wide web for machines,” enthused IoT firm and consortium member Flexeye in a canned statement today.

The firm added that the investment into HyperCat was part of the £45m that Prime Minister David Cameron said the government would spend on IoT in a speech at this year’s CeBIT.

“The UK has an opportunity now, through HyperCat, to be central to the IoT revolution, levelling the playing field with the ubiquitous American giants and inspiring British industry to deliver £100 billion of value by 2020 – Great Britain can grow back its industrial teeth,” gushed Flexeye chief Justin Anderson.

“The government’s investment of £1.6m will support the UK economy by creating new jobs and attracting foreign investment to our shores.”

The consortium expects to publish the HyperCat specification as an independent and publicly available standard through the British Standards Institute sometime next year. ®